"BLOG"--Bush's Legacy Of Goofs - 245
Hal Wastes His Wages
December 3, 2007

With fourteen long months still remaining in what appears to be a lame duck executive branch, many are already beginning to wonder how history will remember the Bush Administration. Well, hopefully with more clarity than those who actually served in the administration, since many "W" alumni appear to have "no recollection" themselves of whatever it was they were doing.

Critics will be quick to cite the obvious, such as the misguided and reckless forced march to war, the mismanaged campaign in Iraq, line-item vetoing of The Constitution, the misery of Katrina's aftermath or that time "the leader of the free world" choked on a pretzel (remember that one?). But there's another far-reaching development which may withstand to encapsulate the Bush era: the advent of the "blog."

Wikipedia, one of many vague intelligence sources that have made an impact during the Bush years, points to 2001 as the time when the American blogosphere came into its own. By Bush's second term in 2005, BlogHerald.com estimated approximately 70 million blogs were active worldwide. You see, Bush and his underlings were fouling up at such a frenetic pace that conventional news outlets lacked the time to adequately illustrate the vastness of these errors. It was a particularly difficult time for hard-hitting* columnists like Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and me (*see my April 10, 2007 exclusive that lit the match on America's barroom flatulence--where were Rich or Dowd on that scoop?)--by the time we had formulated some dazzling, in-depth dissertation on one of the Administration's improprieties they'd already gone and made headlines with something even more astounding. The sheer volume of comical mistakes, unfortunate missteps and egregious misdeeds overwhelmed so-called mainstream media, forcing it to follow the maddening crowd by cutting and pasting snippets of news items then adding three lines of pithy commentary (or sometimes just three letters: like W, T, F). When every "respected" news outlet in the world begins taking their cue from disaffected teens who saw the internet as a forum to address their ennui, there's bound to be a lasting negative result.

But can you blame us? I mean, take a look at this mere sampler from the regime's smoke and mirror smorgasbord: the Orwellian Patriot Act wriggles through Congress and before the ink dries we're invading Iraq. All of a sudden the nation is embroiled in debate over abortion and gay marriage, a minute later the Vice President shoots a guy in the face a second after the Chief of Staff outs a CIA operative. Meanwhile the President gropes the Chancellor of Germany, swears at the British Prime Minister while ordering a Diet Coke and somewhere in the middle of all that he manages to choke on that pretzel.

Asking a writer to cover all that is akin to demanding he or she detail each and every individual firework shot off on the 4^th of July. It seems the best we could do was a quick "oooh" or a snappy "aaah" before the next one went off, and the most efficient vehicle we could come up with became that succinct stream of consciousness we now call the blog. Screwing up faster than the writers could type--I guess that right there is the Bush Legacy for you. It's easy to understand why those snappy writers for late-night TV would see fit to strike under such a demanding workload. And believe me when I tell you, throwing all these new candidates onto the heap isn't helping any. With all these new blips appearing on the blogosphere, it seems many of us have completely lost track of what that wily Bush gang has been up to lately. Hopefully the next Administration can pace itself, because this one has me exhausted. 

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